I write a lot. Sometimes it gets weird.

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Tag: Mom

Over the past month I’ve had two encounters where I’ve been talking with friends I haven’t seen in a while — both of whom I know outside the industry but work inside it — when they said to me, “I thought you went home.”

“No, no, I’ve always been here,” I said.

“You didn’t go home and then come back?” Both of them said that, with a cock of the head. “I could’ve sworn I’d heard you left.”

Both of these people are Facebook friends, which pulls from my Twitter feed. This means I’m not doing a very good job of representing myself lately. And yes, I do a lot of work I’m not allowed to publicly discuss, and I’ve learned important lessons in my million years on the web about what is and isn’t wise to share on the Internet, so I probably err on the side of not enough information.

It has been a very busy year, so I’ll try and give something for everyone here. A little work update for those of you who enjoy reading about the writing life, a little bit of baby info, for those of you who want to know the latest on Qwerty, and finally for those of you who just want to know what Mom’s up to next, a little something special. Continue reading →

For when you’re nursing your child and your mom stands super close to watch it while she chats, and then she gets so caught up in the moment that she leans in and kisses the baby’s head, just centimeters away from your bare breast.

Because that is what happened to me yesterday.

Oh, does that not happen to you on a Thursday? Then I guess maybe we don’t need a whole word for it. Maybe just a therapy session.

So I’ve had this cold. It’s been going on for over a week at this point, which is ridiculous. Listen, if I go through all the trouble to be responsible and get the flu shot before flu season, I shouldn’t be able to get sick for ten days straight with anything. I should get credit for letting someone stick a needle in my arm in the back of a Vons next to the frozen food section. Continue reading →

(I broke the train into two parts. The first part of the train (part six of the story) is here.)

We take the long walk toward dinner. Now we’re a little less sure on our feet. Mom’s getting tired, and I’m a little tired, and it’s darker. We make it to the bar car, which we have to go through to get to our dinner car.

We open the door. It’s different in the dark, more mysterious, more like a lounge, like you’d imagine. The piano abruptly stops and — “Sentimental Journey” begins playing. And Mom’s crying again, but this time she can’t sit because we’re on our way to dinner, so she kind of sits at this stool near the head of the piano, perched like she’s about to launch into song. But she’s crying and smiling and nodding, and I’m rubbing her back and it really must have looked like she was here on a Make A Wish. Continue reading →

So here’s what my mother didn’t know: that months ago I’d asked the Orient Express travel agent if she could help me make even more of Mom’s dreams come true. If you don’t remember, Mom wanted to sit in the bar car of the Orient Express, drinking a pink squirrel while listening to them play “Sentimental Journey.”

“I think we can try to figure that out,” said the agent, understandably hesitantly. Just in case, I emailed her two YouTube links to the song, plus a link to purchase the sheet music, and eBay’ed my own sheet music, which was nestled next to my laptop in my cabin. I emailed the recipe for a Pink Squirrel, which I found on the Mad Men website, of all places (go ahead and read it; it’s gross), and had a print-out of the thing in my notebook. In short: I dorked out. Continue reading →

Look, I went through a redesign and then I was in the dictionary and then I was really busy with multiple pitches and if I finish this script I’ve got due in the next couple of days I’ll have turned in a pilot script, a manuscript and a screenplay all in the past six weeks. So I don’t want to hear it! My fingers have been typing! And I still updated here! What do you people want from me?! Continue reading →